Southeastern University uses Wowza to Stream for Education

Let’s face it, streaming in any industry needs to be reliable and as close to flawless as possible. This is no different for universities, especially because capturing students’ attention and helping them to retain the information is crucial. Ian Fritzsche, Director of Media Services at Southeastern University, knows this all too well.

Ian has worked at Southeastern University in Florida for about ten years and has seen many iterations of how streaming has evolved within the institution. In the earlier days, Southeastern University simply needed to find a way to live stream their chapel services and graduation ceremonies to students and members within the community in a cost-conscious way. They were utilizing a third-party content delivery network (CDN) service for this need, but soon discovered that they wanted more flexibility and control. They also realized that a large number of CDNs don’t provide transcoding capabilities, and found this is problematic for live streaming.

Since then, they have expanded what they stream to include large conferences to viewers across the world and events on campus, as well as continuing to keep their chapel services and meeting streams running. All this streaming brought Southeastern University and Wowza Streaming Engine together.

Southeastern University is currently running Wowza Streaming Engine server software on an Amazon EC2 instance to take advantage of the simple integration as Works With Wowza partners. This provides the versatility that they need for unknown audience size as well as fluctuation in bandwidth connections. A lot of the streaming at Southeastern University is also shared on an internal Roku channel. Finding a streaming tool that integrated well with this third party tool was imperative.

“We have been very pleased with the flexibility, ease of use and top notch documentation that Wowza provides. Wowza Streaming Engine has allowed us to share numerous events at a high quality and succeed on a large number of fronts,” Ian Fritzsche shares.

The streaming capabilities within universities are becoming more and more robust to keep up with the changing streaming expectations. Southeastern University has surged ahead of the curve and made sure that they provide the best quality streams to their students.